July 2010
12 posts
3 tags
Customer Support is the New Marketing (or Not)
Rob Kalin from Etsy has referred to customer support as marketing and Etsy has significantly enhanced its customers support team to cut down response time dramatically. Danny Meyer in his book Setting the Table and the actual operations of his restaurants also makes helping the customer central to the experience. I believe this to be especially important in an age where a customer whose problem...
Inception
Saw Inception on Sunday evening and loved it despite (because?) some its glaring flaws. It is a spectacular mashup of some of my favorite movie elements: philosophy, action, heist, stunning imagery and more action- all on a huge IMAX screen (the way movies are meant to be seen). The philosophy element is about some of the deep unresolved questions around consciousness, free will and our...
5 tags
Privacy, Secrecy and Reputation, Oh My!
I love the duality of the Jeffrey Rosen piece about the End of Forgetting in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the release of the Afghanistan files via Wikileaks. Citizens and governments are faced with a fundamental challenge to privacy and secrecy. This is not a change in degree, like the advent of photo copiers compared to hand-cranked ink paper (yup, old enough to have used that!). It is a...
5 tags
Portland, Oregon
I am on the road in Portland, Oregon for OSCON. It is interesting that OSCON is here again after being in Silicon Valley in 2009. In 2009, I happened to sit down at lunch next to a development officer for the city of Portland who said he was attending because he wanted to make sure they could bring the conference back to Portland! There already are some interesting startups based here, such as...
2 tags
Applying Engineering to Business: Binding...
Fred has been posting a wonderful series of MBA Mondays posts that I recommend to everyone who wants to know more about the business side of startups. If you come from the engineering side, it may also help to think about business using engineering principles. My favorite one is the idea of a “single binding constraint.”
When the execution of a program runs into a hardware...
The Case of the Missing Google Notes
So I am finally midstream in migrating off Exchange and onto Google. Email - check (gmail). Contacts - check (google contacts). Calendar - check (gcal). Notes - what no Google notes? Huh? I may be overlooking something obvious here, but it doesn’t seem as if Google has a direct equivalent of notes. Now as it happens, I use notes a lot. For instance, I keep a running list of ideas for blog...
2 tags
Admitting Mistakes
A quality that I find hugely important but increasingly rare in people is the willingness to admit mistakes. Growing up I wasn’t really part of a culture in which mistakes are openly discussed and used as an opportunity to learn. For a long time, my own approach was therefore one of just moving on or trying to fix things without admitting to any mistakes (often compounding the initial...
4 tags
Android versus Apple (Flash, App Inventor)
Yesterday evening I wanted to bone up on the racing rules in sailing after having had a close encounter while rounding the leward mark last Thursday (which elicited quite a blue streak from the skipper of the other boat). I really wanted to see some animations of different situations that one might encounter to test my understanding of the rules. After a quick search I wound up on the UK Halsey...
Time for (Web) Reminders of the Wars?
As in the past 8 years, we went to see the Scarsdale Memorial Day parade earlier this year. Attendance was incredibly low. I remarked to Susan then that this is a direct function of virtually no one in Scarsdale having a family member in the military. As far as I can tell, we have essentially “outsourced” fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the poorer parts of the States. I...
Some Career Advice
Following our recent recruiting effort to find Christina and Gary I have been spending a fair bit of time meeting with people we encountered in the process who wanted career advice. Here are some of the points I have found myself talking about repeatedly. First: many people think they want to be an entrepreneur but few actually are. The best way to tell is to look at the things you have already...
Some Useful Perspective
Yes it is officially hot in New York City these days. I don’t know if I can stand this when I am older, but for now I quite enjoy the huge seasonal differences. They are a reminder that much as we may obsess about things that happen at work or at home, there are much bigger forces surrounding us (we all live on a rock traveling through space). This is a useful bit of perspective. One of the...
5 tags
A Run In With Bacteria
I love to blog about all the awesome things that the Internet is bringing and how that creates great investment opportunities. But once in a while I have first hand experiences that remind me how much innovation could/should/will (?) occur in other areas. Last week was one of those. One of our kids suddenly had areas of skin the size of quarters essentially dissolve. The pediatrician thought...
